"That summer anyhow. Miss Blake was fifteen." For a lumpily modeled face, Judd's was expressive. When he mentioned her, the blobby features sagged.
"You went to a picnic at the Chalmerses', 7th of August, this year?"
"Yes. Can't add anything to what Ella Jason testified."
But Hunter fussed at it a while. Mann's attention wandered. No individual like another, no one replaceable, not vague soft Judd for instance or any other. A commonplace: why go on worrying at it, insisting that no one is expendable? Expendable—the stink of that word lingered from a war already part forgotten, obscured by a more vast and quiet terror. Under the new terror the politics of 1959 had been squirming in a fantastic display of the passions of a disturbed ant hill. Expendable: well, the first to express this obscenity must have been some thick-browed operator of prehistory, who found his fellows could be manipulated by appropriate grunts and chest-thumpings into doing a concerted job of skull-busting and rape on those Bad People with a better campsite and interesting females. As the original inventor of advertising was the one (man or woman?) who first got the idea of tying a rag on the genitals.
Mann remembered how in the war years most people, having gagged a bit at the gnat of that word expendable, had then swallowed the camel of the fact with no great strain. How does it happen that a man who transferred to the Medics mostly out of distaste for carrying a rifle is now a judge of General Sessions, in a state that keeps the death penalty on the books?
"Have you met Miss Blake often since she moved to Winchester?"
"No, sir, hardly at all. We—hadn't much in common."
"I see. No ill feeling between you, was there?"
"No, sir, not that. I get along with people—try to." Judd looked more unhappy; perhaps he felt the prosecutor's silence pushing him. "Well—when I thought about it at all—guess I supposed she'd outgrow that cynical attitude, atheism, all that stuff."
"I object!" Warner spoke quietly and, for once, coldly. "Again the prosecution allows a witness to express loose, incompetent opinions."